Construction Insurance Bulletin

Drill-bit Taylor

What do you do when you get impaled by a drill bit?

Look we warned you this list gets a little gruesome: You unscrew it.

That’s what happened when Ron Hunt tipped his ladder over during a routine drilling job and wound up with the drill bit stick in the second worst place for it to go: his head. The amazing thing is that, today, he’s perfectly fine. The medical team got the bit out, put in some plates, and he made a full recovery. Unfortunately, he was uninsured at the time, so there was some permanent damage, but only to his checking account.

Lumberjack Miraculously OK

Chainsaws have to be the scariest tool to take out on the job with you. Forthman Murff was out chopping some wood when he was struck by the branch of a tree he’d just cut down, knocked into a ditch, and then… well, he caught the chainsaw right in the neck. Amazingly, the saw missed his spine and arteries and he managed to drive himself to a friend’s house where he waited for an ambulance. If that doesn’t convince you that this is the toughest guy alive, he still lists the loves of his life as “Jesus, music and chainsaws.”

Bazooka Joe

You tend not to think much about injury in the armed forces: If your crew has a bad day with a bazooka, you don’t live to tell the tale… unless your name is Channing Moss. Moss’ unit was hit with an RPG attack, and he took it head-on, but instead of detonating, the rocket got stuck on the way through his body. They managed to get the still-live rocket out of him by sawing the fins off, and he made a full recovery. Most army guys would take a bullet for their men, but how many would take a bazooka?

Your best bet for surviving an on-the-job accident is to not get into one. But, it’s heartening to know that the human body can survive a lot more punishment than you might suspect. If you can move quickly in a crisis, if you can apply first aid and think clearly, you might have a chance at getting out of a life-threatening scrape without losing so much as a pinky toe. Not that we’d want to be in the position to find out…

Scheduling can be one of the biggest logistical headaches when it comes to running a construction crew. If you keep giving people overtime, that can take a serious chunk out of your budget, but if you don’t give people enough hours, they might go find someone who does. Two guys on your crew might not get along, but what if you need them on the same day?

On top of all this, you have safety to consider. Scheduling is both technical and intuitive, and unless you’re going to have us visit your worksite, there are a lot of issues that we’re not going to be able to help you with… but, we can give you a few tips on creating a schedule that emphasizes safety:

Seize On Sunny Days

When you have a nice sunny day, get your crew outdoors to do roofing and siding, this way you won’t wind up trying to get your project done on time by working in the rain and cold on rooftops and scaffoldings.

Give Out Overtime Sparingly

Nothing is more dangerous on a jobsite than an overworked employee who’s in a rush to get home. Some overtime here and there is a great way to put a few extra dollars in your crew members’ pockets, but overworked employees are bad news. Anymore than a few hours of overtime a week per employee is asking for trouble.

Do The Dangerous Work In The Morning

The safest time to do the more dangerous work tends to be in the morning, after everyone’s had their first cup of coffee, but before the post-lunch wind-down has begun. Spend the afternoons hanging up drywall, use the morning to bring out the spot welding team and the pneumatic drill while everyone is still sharp. This will also let you get this work done without rushing to finish it up before quitting time.

Work In Daylight

They call’em “nine-to-fives” for a reason. Trying to get work done before the sun has come up or after it’s gone down can be pretty dangerous. When possible, stick to a regular daytime schedule to make sure you don’t have to deal with limited visibility on the job.

The best thing you can do when it comes to scheduling is to give yourself some breathing room. With a couple extra laborers, you can stretch more hours across a bigger crew, so you don’t need to worry about overworking anyone. Some people like to work Saturdays, but if you take the whole weekend off, then you have your weekends free as your “just in case you’re needed” days. Keep your scheduling flexible and the job becomes that much easier.

If we define craftsmanship as simply taking pride in your work, then it is the backbone of any and all tasks. You won’t get a lot of return clients without craftsmanship, and you won’t even enjoy doing the work much in the first place.

A house or a wall or an office building that you’ve built stands as a sort of enormous calling card. If that work doesn’t last, if the foundation was crafted poorly, then even if you don’t wind up with a liability case on your hands, you still have an eyesore that stands as a testament to your disinterest in the work. Better to have work stand as a testament to your abilities, even if that means turning down a job that won’t allow you to do your best work because of budgetary or scheduling issues.

Craftsmanship is the core of professionalism. If you are lucky enough to do what you love for a living, why would you not do it to the best of your abilities? Craftsmanship is how you get good reviews from your clients, it’s how you get repeat business, it’s how you support yourself.

The best way to ensure longevity in your industry is to put craftsmanship above all else. This means:

• Hiring the best people, and training them to be up to your standards
• Finding the best clients, people who will allow you to do your best work
• Turning down any jobs that would force you to compromise yourself
• Continued learning, a fifty year old carpenter should know more than they did at forty

All of this is really just a roundabout way of saying: Do the best work you’re capable of doing, every time out, and don’t take work that will force you to take shortcuts.

The truth is that the skills we develop in construction are not rare. Once you’ve got the basics down, anybody of sound mind and able body can put together a tool shed or install a sink. If that’s all you can offer, then the only front on which you can fight for business is price. But with craftsmanship, these skills are no longer simply a commodity, but something of an art form. Anybody can install a sink, but can just anybody install it with a perfect caulking seam? With craftsmanship we are not offering the same thing as our competitors, we’re offering the opportunity to have it done better.

The vast majority of workplace injuries are not the broken legs and cuts that need stitches, but the banged thumbs, nicked fingers and twisted ankles that take place during the most routine tasks. You know to be safe around a pneumatic drill, you know to be safe around the spot welding equipment. Not everyone knows to pace themselves when using a simple hammer or a power drill. They say that most car accidents take place near the home, where you’re comfortable and you let your guard down. It’s the same with construction work: The most dangerous job is frequently the one that you’ve done a million times.

Never Neglect Your Safety Gear

A stray piece of sawdust when using a power drill or a circular saw can lead to serious eye injury. Don’t let your workers do anything without the proper safety gear. If you’re working with wood, safety goggles and gloves are a must.

Make Time

No matter how small a job may seem, allow yourself the proper amount of time to get it done the right way. A little bit of breathing room can make all the difference between finishing a job safely, and doing it correctly, and rushing so that a simple task becomes impossibly difficult, and surprisingly dangerous.

Check Your Equipment

A cracked hammer, a screwdriver with a loose grip, is a serious injury just waiting to happen. Keep an eye on your hand tools and make sure to replace any tools that have seen better days, whether it’s a pry-bar or a socket wrench.

Maintain A Strict Sobriety Stance

You’ve probably seen buddies who could drink three beers and then raise a barn roof one-handed. That’s a neat trick, but it’s not worth the risk on a professional job site. The liability issues that come with drugs and alcohol on the job site simply are not worth the trouble. Even if an employee suffers an injury that might have happened whether or not they were sober, that’s not a question you want to be asking yourself, and it’s not a question that the judge is going to bother asking. Knock a few back after work, but keep the job site sober.

Common sense, caution and basic safety procedures will help to reduce not only the big on-site injuries, the scaffolding falls and the heavy machinery slip-ups, but the sliced fingers and busted thumbs, as well.

On a job site, you’re going to have people of varying levels of experience and expertise. A stone mason, for instance, is an artist, a scientist and a builder all in one. That’s not a job that you can hand over to just anybody. Then again, how experienced does someone need to be to help carry lumber across the site and hold a wall up while you piece a frame together?

Not every job demands an expert, but, that’s not to say that “any idiot can do it.” There are a few basic requirements you’re looking for when hiring your crew, even if they’re only going to be handling the most basic tasks.

A basic sense of how to stay safe on a job site is a must. If there’s one thing that “any idiot” can do on a jobsite, it’s injure themselves. Make sure your new guys know all about basic on-site safety, from hard hats and safety goggles to on-the-job common sense. A great thing about construction work is that almost anybody can take on an entry level position and learn a trade, but you don’t want people who simply have no sense for the job, people who got kicked out of shop class so the school wouldn’t wind up getting sued.

Show your new hires around the place, let them know where the first-aid kits are and what to do in an emergency. Keep an eye on them on their first day, make sure that they know what they’re doing, and don’t assign them to any tasks that you’re not sure they can safely handle.

Take time to teach your gofers. If it’s a small crew, you can get hands-on with them and show them the ropes. There are trade schools for HVAC pros and electricians, but there’s not much you can do to learn how to be a general handyman besides learn on the job. If you have a larger crew, you can turn a fresh hire into an expert in no time by assigning them to unofficial apprentice positions, helping your carpentry crew to build the frame one day, installing a tub with the bathroom team the next.

Too often, first aid tips are passed off as fact when they’re based on outdated information or old wives tales. Here are a few that still persist even in 2016:

Ingesting Vomiting Always Works

In the old days, if someone swallowed some cleaning fluid or something, the immediate response was to induce vomiting to get the poison out of their system. There are times when inducing vomiting can help, but you should never do this before speaking with Poison Control. Many poisons can do just as much damage coming back up as they did going in. Many poisons, like the chemicals found in laundry detergent, can be counteracted with milk. Milk will curdle the chemicals and make them difficult for the stomach to digest.

Tourniquets Are A First Line Of Defense

Tourniquets are a major compromise: In the most extreme of emergencies, a tourniquet might save a person’s life, at the expense of the injured limb. When encountering a serious wound, you want to stop the bleeding with direct pressure to the cut itself with a clean cloth (or paper towel, bandage, t-shirt, whatever you can get your hands on) while somebody calls 911.

Butter Can Help A Burn

Rubbing an oil all over a burn is actually not a very good idea. Ice, cold water and topical ointments are really your only option until help arrives.

Soak A Sprain In Hot Water

This can actually increase swelling. The correct response is rest, ice, compression wrap, and elevate, or RICE.

Staying Awake Can “Fix” A Concussion

The main reason you don’t want someone to fall asleep after a head injury is so that you can monitor their condition. You can’t check the pupil dilation when someone’s eyes are closed. For serious head injuries, immediate medical attention is absolutely necessary. Keeping a person awake will not guarantee that they’re fine.

Tilt Your Head Back To Stop A Nosebleed

This will only result in blood getting into your stomach or lungs. Better to sit up straight and apply pressure to the flesh part of the nose just below the bone. Hold it for ten minutes straight without letting up to check if it’s stopped until the ten minutes have passed.

Let Your Wound Breathe

Paying a little extra for quality tools and materials is, sometimes, a good idea. But let’s be honest: What can a two hundred dollar hammer do that a twenty dollar hammer cannot? It’s just a hunk of steel you use to whack nails into wood. As long as it’s durable enough to get the job done, there’s nothing that another hundred eighty dollars adds to the experience, is there?

It’s worth investing a little extra in quality, but if you Google the best bottles of wine in the world, you’ll find several in the $20-$100 range, and a few in the $3,000+ range. Is the human tongue even sophisticated enough to tell two thousand nine hundred dollars of difference? When you buy cheap, you get what you pay for, certainly, but after a certain point, any improvement in quality you get by spending more money is going to be tremendously marginal.

So how expensive should any given tool be? The tricky thing about that question is that the answer is subjective: A tool is worth what you’re willing to pay.

Your best bet in shopping for tools and materials in construction is not to equate price with quality. Simply look for top-reviewed products, brands you’re comfortable with or that come highly recommended, and grab the one that’s within your budget. Buying the cheapest tool available might wind up costing you more in the long run if it malfunctions, if it causes an injury, if it breaks down and needs to be replaced a month after you’ve taken it out of the box. But we’ve pretty much mastered the power drill in the $50-$100 range. Spending an extra $200 on the purchase isn’t going to make a job any easier.

When it comes to cars, suburban homes, fashion, gourmet food, it’s not always about quality so much as it is about status. There are $20,000 luxury cars that feel as nice as a $100,000 alternative, but nobody turns their head and says “Wow, get a look at that Toyota!” Construction is a more practical field in many ways. When you walk onto a job site with a two hundred dollar hammer, your co-workers are more likely to laugh than envy you.

Let’s say a teenager wanders onto your construction site. Maybe they’re looking for a place to hang out with their friends, maybe they just weren’t looking where they were going while playing Pokemon Go. However they got there, there’s a whole lot of potential danger on the site. There are nails to step on, ledges to walk right off of, and plenty of things to trip over or bump into. Long story short, somebody who shouldn’t be on the construction site gets injured, and their family decides to file a lawsuit for it.

The question this leaves us with: Who gets sued?

Oftentimes, but not always, the answer is: Whoever can most afford to get sued.

An attorney is going to look for the biggest possible target. If Wal-Mart hires a local construction crew and somebody gets hurt on the site, Wal-Mart is likely to offer a huge settlement to make the whole problem go away. The construction crew has a reputation to maintain and relatively limited resources, and they’re more likely to fight the case, and more likely to go to great lengths to prove that they were not at fault.

The injured party is, more often than not, just looking to get their medical bills paid, and, more often than not, that means looking for a cash settlement from the biggest financial entity involved, not suing a local roofing company and spending weeks in court.

This may not always be the case. The person filing a claim may have it out for the construction crew, thinking them primarily at fault. The client may have a reputation for spending more money in court than they would if they had simply agreed to a settlement. A number of factors play into who winds up being targeted in a lawsuit. More often than not, the people filing the claim are only looking to have their ends covered as quickly as possible, but there are a lot of variables.

The point is, it’s not always the party most at-fault that winds up defending themselves in court. An attorney helps to select the target based on a number of factors, and whether or not a party is most at-fault is less important than whether the most fiscally powerful party can be said to be at fault.

If you’ve been working with your hands for any length of time, then you know that the difference between a professional job and a DIY project isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum. On one end, you’re taking your team out to build a house on a client’s property, and on the other end, you’re building a birdhouse in your garage just because it seemed like a fun way to kill an afternoon. In the middle, you’ve got storage sheds, home repairs, additional rooms, doghouses and so on. At some point along that spectrum, insuring your project becomes a necessity, either for legal or pragmatic reasons. But where exactly is that point? What kind of DIY projects do you need to get insured, and which ones can you afford to not worry about?

You have a few main concerns, here:

1. Are you investing more than you can afford to lose?

1. Is liability a concern?

1. Will this affect any existing insurance policies you hold?

Take, for instance, building an additional room onto your home. This is going to have an effect on your existing homeowner’s policy, and if you don’t inform your insurer about your project, you may wind up invalidating that policy altogether.

On the other hand, spending a weekend erecting a doghouse in your backyard probably won’t affect your homeowner’s policy at all, and you’re probably not spending more than a hundred dollars on lumber and other materials. You may even be piecing it together from scrap wood left over from another project. The only concern here is liability, which might or might not be covered by your current homeowner’s policy. To play it safe you can always build a doghouse in the garage and wheel it out to the yard on a dolly to make sure you don’t wind up with barbecue guests stepping on a nail or something, but it’s generally worth checking your policy before starting any such project, just to be sure.

There are projects that may be covered by your homeowner’s policy in terms of liability, but wind up costing a little more than piecing a doghouse together out of scrap lumber. A shed, for instance, or costly home improvements. In these instances it’s down to peace of mind. Are you comfortable working without insurance, or would you like to have a safety net just in case?

If you’re bringing other people onto a project, then of course you’re probably going to want some basic liability coverage, but for more DIY projects than not, the rule of thumb is not to worry about insurance unless you feel uncomfortable without it, it’s required by law as with larger structures like guest homes, or it’s affecting a policy you already hold.

3D printing is an exciting new technology, isn’t it? If you break the case for your iPhone, you can print one on-demand in just a few minutes, no more waiting for a new case to ship. If you want to create a 3D model of a new building project, you can have your architect whip one up on a computer and print it out without so much as needing to go buy a box of Lego bricks. 3D printing is truly the next frontier in manufacturing, but…

What if you work in manufacturing?

The downside to 3D printing is that a lot of jobs will become obsolete. Transportation jobs will be hit, factory jobs will be hit, what about construction?

We’ve read about 3D printed housing that can knock out 10 sturdy homes in one day. A team in China put together a 3D printed home that can withstand an 8.0 earthquake. How can a builder who uses their hands compete with that?

Well, here’s how…

1. 3D Printers Don’t Do Drywall

   3D printed homes are utilitarian, really. They lay out the walls, the roof, but they can’t handle the finer details of the job. A 3D printed home isn’t really a “home,” it’s a concrete box. Even if we get to a point where 3D printed homes are the norm, we’re looking at decades before robots can handle every part of the job.

1. 3D Printed Homes Are Currently Impractical As An Everyday Solution

   3D printers for buildings aren’t like printers for remote controls and desktop fans. The cheapest printers for homes still cost millions of dollars, and are larger than the homes they build. If someone wants to have a guest-home erected on their property, they’re far more likely to hire a construction crew than rent a robot.

1. 3D Printed Homes Are Not Unique

   Right now, 3D printed homes are an effective solution for emergency housing following a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, and they’re becoming more popular in China where such a solution is needed given the large population. But right now and for the foreseeable future, all a home-printer can really do is lay out dozens of identical concrete shacks. They’re not a serious threat to the luxury home builder, they can’t build additional rooms onto existing homes, they can’t perform maintenance or remodeling work, the list of things that they can’t do is a thousand items longer than the list of things that they can do.

The worst case scenario: Within our lifetimes, house-printers may become mobile, versatile and affordable enough to lay out the framework of the home, but we’re still going to need people to get in there and do the hands-on work of drywalling, plumbing, electric wiring, cabinets, and so on.